JOE LIEBERMAN UNLEASHED, (A brief history of a pathetic politician)

JOE LIEBERMAN UNLEASHED (A brief history of a pathetic politician)
8/15/06

I have held back writing my comments on the Lamont Lieberman contest because of my very vocal radio stance against Joe Lieberman. I have been calling Joe Lieberman , Joe “Lieberworm” for the last four years on my radio show. I was also the first talk show host in the nation to interview Ned Lamont when he started his campaign this year. I have to say with all honesty that Ned Lamont, because he was a Democrat, did not overwhelmingly impress me; though compared to Joe Lieberman Ned Lamont was a prince amongst men. That may be an over statement but I sensed his character was real and he honestly wanted to get the country out of Iraq . Ned called himself the “Entrepreneurial Candidate “hoping to create new opportunities in Connecticut and help steer the Senate in a better direction.

I asked Ned what he would do if Harry Reid called him up and told him to stop his campaign against Lieberman, the way Schumer and Reid told the popular Paul Hackert the Iraq War vet in Ohio to step down. Ned said that he would still run against Lieberman regardless of the Democrat’s support. That statement alone made me like Ned Lamont. He’s got spunk and he has a whole lot of his own money and he wasn’t afraid to battle on alone. I don’t know who his financial supporters were when he first started his campaign for the primaries but; with 100 million of his own money I felt that the question would have been irrelevant.

In the summer of 2005, I interviewed another potential Lieberman challenger named Mitch Fuchs.(see archives for the interview) He was the Democratic town chairman of Fairfield Connecticut. Mitch was furious at Lieberman for ignoring the consensus of the Connecticut Democratic Party and the town chairmen. Mitch Fuchs stated in my recorded interview that, Joe Lieberman told the gathered crowd of the 4th District Connecticut Democratic town chairmen that “He didn’t need their support because he had a 70% approval rating nationally. ” Mitch and all the other chairmen became outraged at Lieberman’s arrogance and began to develop a campaign against Lieberman. Mitch Fuchs’s campaign, except for my radio interview, never really got off the ground. The fact that he didn’t have a personal fortune of 100 million dollars and no financial supporters caused his campaign to fail before it really got started. It was Mitch Fuchs who really got the anti Lieberman campaign going in Connecticut.

Personally I liked Mitch Fuchs because he was a true , unjaded Democratic Idealist, but as so many idealists Mitch didn’t make it to the primaries. Ned Lamont has the characteristics of an independent thinker however, it would be interesting to note if he would have ran as an independent against Joe Lieberman if he had lost the primary. Either way he would have had my support over “Lieberworm”. Nobody but Republicans and Republicrats like Joe Lieberman. He was always a Republican Lite. In the 2004 Presidential primaries he pulled out of the race before he faced a humiliating defeat in his home state. He got less than 10% in New Hampshire where he actually took up residence for a while and rented an apartment so he could campaign there. That stunt got a lot of attention in the Connecticut media and put another nail in Lieberman’s political coffin.

One of the biggest political farces in state and national politics was Joe Lieberman’s 2000 campaign for Senate and Vice President. He wouldn’t give up his senate seat to run for Vice President so the Republican party in Connecticut whose leader at the time was the disgraced and imprisoned Governor John Rowland, put up the most corrupt Republican in Connecticut History, then mayor of Waterbury,Ct. Phil Giordano. Lieberman won the Senate race by virtual default. Giordano got less than 6 % of the vote. Giordano was later convicted of being a pedophile, caught with two under 10 year old Vietnamese prostitutes, hired out to Giordano by their mother. He was sentenced to forty years in a federal prison for corruption and other assorted criminal activities.

I can vividly remember seeing Phil Giordano at the 2000 Goshen Connecticut Fair. He was standing under a tent at a podium with a life size cardboard cutout of Joe Lieberman, while conducting a mock debate, because Lieberman refused to debate him. Many Connecticut voters were ticked off at Lieberman during the 2000 Senate race because he spent no time in Connecticut or in Washington and was running for both offices at the same time. Had he won the Vice Presidency he would have given up his Democratic seat in the Senate and been replaced by a Republican appointee. Lieberman had the poorest voting attendance in the Senate that year and tied with John Kerry in 2004 for the most missed votes in the Senate. That was the year of the Energy Bill and the Medicare Bill. He missed both votes in the Senate. For all practical political purposes Joe Lieberman was and is worthless to Connecticut and to the nation.

Joe Lieberman is without a doubt the most cynical and contemptuous politician I have ever known. In the 2004 campaign Lieberman’s campaign staff resigned after his campaign manager criticized him publicly for spending too much of his campaign monies on personal expenses and for giving his three children six figure salaries . His answer to her was to reduce all campaign staff salaries with the exception of himself and his kids by 20 percent. The campaign manager and his entire staff resigned in disgust. In the 2006 primary campaign he fired his campaign staff several weeks before the primary, when he found he was running 20 percent behind Lamont in the polls. I have been a Connecticut resident for 30 years and have endured Lieberman’s awful record during all of his career and never voted for him once. The Democratic Party has unleashed the political animal to roam as he wishes. Isn’t it odd how he has responded so eagerly to Karl Rove’s whistle?

L.A. STEEL